Presentation Transcript:
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Solutions from HP Slide 1:
Steve Tramack:
Well, hello. I’m Steve Tramack. I’m a Senior Engineering Manager with HP focused on Microsoft Solutions, and I have the pleasure today of sharing some of the ways that HP is supporting the Microsoft launch of Exchange Server 2010. Exchange 2010 presents a series of new challenges associated with implementing functionality enhancements in areas of things such as fault tolerance, compliance and archival, and scalability, and these challenges lead to new opportunities upon which HP is prepared to help you capitalize.
Slide 2:
So over the next 20 or 25 minutes or so we’ll review some of Microsoft’s design goals around Exchange 2010 and discuss some of the specific advantages for selecting HP as your partner in planning, deploying, and/or managing your infrastructure. We’ll review some specific reference architectures designed for organizations ranging from 100-4,000 users, leveraging new
capabilities such as Database Availability Groups, or DAGs, with an exchange. We’ll also look at some appropriate server and storage offerings. In addition to these reference configurations HP provides sizing and planning tools that allow you to best determine the architectural elements that meet your business needs. The HP Sizer for Exchange 2010, which is due for release as a free download from HP.com in November, provides a method of converting your specific needs tailored into an architectural solution suited ideally with your business in mind, so we’ll take a sneak peak at the Sizer during this session.
Slide 3:
You know, for more than 25 years the HP and Microsoft frontline partnership has reflected the power and purpose of our deep-rooted relationship. It’s a testament to our commitment as industry leaders to share our respective knowledge and experience toward a singular goal: to put the strength of our world class people, processes, and technology into the hands of our customers so they can innovate, adapt, and unleash new business value. To achieve that goal we jointly engineer innovative products, conduct joint customer outreach focused on their business needs and challenges, and cooperatively develop support and services capabilities into technology solutions that address those needs. HP is uniquely qualified in several respects related to our relationship with Microsoft. Not only do we have the world’s largest Microsoft infrastructure deployment but we put our lessons learned to use throughout our services and alliances communities. (inaudible) organizations that engage with HP and choose to deploy HP infrastructure to benefit from our experiences. It is the breadth and depth of our relationship combined with our global reach which has led Microsoft to name HP as its only prime integrator. Slide 4:
You know, as Microsoft started to think about their areas of investment for the next major release of Exchange they spent time asking customers and partners about what challenges they face in managing their critical messaging infrastructure. Several key themes emerged from these discussions, including “How can I be more productive in a world of ever increasing volumes of communication, such as e-mail, voicemail, instant messaging, RSS feeds?” I don’t know anyone
who’s getting less e-mail today than they did even a year ago. How can you manage this communication overload and enable customers to more easily prioritize and react to what’s in their inbox? Customers ask, “Can you let me specify rules in how to best communicate in a way that doesn’t intrude in my work or personal life?” Next, as organizations scale to new heights how can they better communicate with globally distributed customers, partners, and employees? The global address list more and more needs to include individuals and things outside of their active directory. Customers ask how can they easily locate each other, coordinate, schedule meetings, et cetera, in this new world of work. The third area is related to the high cost of communications. It’s driving customers to find more efficient and cost effective ways to deliver and support mission critical business assets, such as Exchange. Customers ask, “How can I make use of the existing infrastructure or services over the internet to achieve these levels of scale at a lower cost?” The last key area that Microsoft heard was related to increasing security and compliance requirements. Customers want to protect their users, their business partners, their customers from a range of security risks, such as accidental information disclosure and malicious software threats. While there are certainly other challenges that users are facing, these four areas were heard consistently across Microsoft customers of all sizes and industry
[verticals?]. Slide 5:
Enter Exchange 2010, the next generation of Microsoft’s ubiquitous messaging platform
designed specifically to address these key customer requirements. Exchange 2010 is architected around three guiding principles. First, protection and compliance: In today’s increasingly regulated environment it’s become critical to efficiently preserve business records. This includes e-mail, which has quickly become the principal source of data in legal discovery and other compliance related investigations. The second area is anywhere access. The success of your business really hinders on your ability to make your users more productive and effective through the technology solutions you deliver. While Exchange 2007 started to deliver on this promise, Exchange 2010 helps users get even more done by giving them freedom to securely access all their communications: their e-mail, their voicemail, and instant messaging and more from virtually any platform, any web browser, Outlook web access or devices through industry standard protocols. The third area is flexibility and reliability. There’s a pressure today to optimize your IT infrastructure for the ever changing business requirements. This allows and requires you to be agile and requires you to invest in solutions that provide you in the
organizations of choice. Exchange 2010 gives you both the flexibility to tailor your deployment base and your unique needs and simplify the way of keeping e-mail continuously available for your users. Exchange 2010 provides organizations with the flexibility to achieve these goals by deploying either on premise or leverage as a hosted software as a service model with cloud based Exchange 2010 offerings. The product has been designed to support organizations that wish to blend these models and even seamlessly move users between on premise and hosted mailbox services.
Slide 6:
HP is uniquely positioned to provide a complete end-to-end solution stack for Exchange 2010. As mentioned in the opening slides, HP and Microsoft have a broad reaching long term
relationship, and this strategic alliance was furthered earlier this year in an announcement at Interop in Las Vegas in May. HP and Microsoft jointly committed funding to ensure a strong
end-to-end unified communication collaboration experience from both companies. HP is the leading server and storage vender in the industry, and specifically accounts for more than 40% of the exchange server and storage and deployment today. In many organizations we use the move to Exchange 2010 to increase mailbox quotas and implement features such as the personal archive, eliminating TSTs once and for all. Doing so both increases the capacity demands in the storage subsystem and places an even higher degree of importance on data resiliency. Microsoft enabled this new paradigm through greater than 50% reductions at the I/O footprint of the mailbox server, coupled with new database availability group replication model. This allows for wider range of storage deployment options than ever before, making technology such as Midline SAS and SATA disks viable alternatives for production use, depending on the organizational SLAs. HP offers a full portfolio of server and storage offerings designed to meet the solution that best meets each user’s business requirements. With the latest generation of ProLiant and BladeSystem servers HP provides unique power and cooling advantages on top of industry standard technology, providing both transactional performance and operational ROI benefits over the previous versions and competitive infrastructures. For those customers considering SAS and SATA, either Enterprise or Midline disks, that still wanted to capitalize in the infrastructure benefits of BladeSystem, the HP StorageWorks 600 Modular Disk System, or MDS600, redefines the industry’s perception of direct-attached storage. The MDS600 connects through a SAS switch internal to the C class BladeSystem enclosure, and it then connects to rate controllers within the individual blade servers. The MDS600 can be zoned for multiple servers or consumed by an Enterprise class Exchange 2010 mailbox environment. The MDS600 supports large form factor SAS and SATA disks, can be configured in either RAID or JBOD modes, JBOD meaning Just a Bunch Of Disks, which allows for flexibility in deployment
ranging from mid-market to Enterprise with varying DAG configuration models. MDS600 takes its place in a portfolio that ranges from servers with internal disks, up to 25 internal small form factor drives, to external direct attached drive shells, to entry level fiber channel and [ISCSI?] rays, all the way up to Enterprise class SANs, supporting a variety of storage and replication needs across the data center.
Slide 7:
Exchange 2010 also offers deployment flexibility in terms of location of users’ mailboxes, either on premise or hosted in the cloud by Microsoft and/or HP. Exchange 2010’s administration eases the blending of these models. The HP adaptive infrastructure forms the basis of our value add. It provides an advanced portfolio of product services and solutions with clear steps in methodologies, designed to move you toward the next generation of data center. In terms of business outcomes, our clients, servers, storage, networking products, solutions, and services all help customers grow fast or be more competitive in this economy. They take cost out of the IT and business solutions with manageability, software, and alliance partnership solutions, and they also minimize risk through our Enterprise services and consulting organizations. HP’s technical depth and Exchange deployment expertise is unmatched in the industry. We enjoy a close knit relationship with Microsoft, including engineers hosted directly on campus by the Exchange development team, and we frequently engage in joint testing projects in the early stages of the product life cycle. We enjoy [broad directional?] sharing of performance and planning best practices, which serve to influence the design and development of Microsoft’s planning and testing tools for Exchange. HP provides a significant amount of supporting evidence as to why HP for Exchange in the form of planning, sizing, performance, and best practices, collaterals
such as tools and white papers, webinars, and recorded demos. All this information is freely provided in HP’s solutions portal, ActiveAnswers. HP Enterprise Services also provide a host of offerings around Exchange 2010, and can assist customers in enabling new capabilities and services within Exchange 2010, such as the software as a service model, archival and
compliance, and unified inboxes. Leveraging HP’s expertise and experience can help customers realize return on their investment on these new services much faster.
Slide 8:
The new HP ProLiant G6 servers are an outstanding foundation for Exchange 2010 deployments, and these new platforms, including racks, towers, and blades, are designed with three goals in mind. The first is to minimize power consumption or spend less for your power, allowing you to spend less for your power and having more for your business in that case. A specific interest is the dynamic power capping capability. This allows you to triple the number of servers in your data center. You can set power limits on each server or enclosure in a safe manner that reacts faster than any circuit breaker. With G6 servers you can measure the power usage of each server even more precisely and then set your own face plate so that more servers can be deployed within an existing power capacity. HP’s Insight Control manages this simply and dynamically across enclosures and servers. So in many environments dynamic power capping allows three times as many servers to be deployed within an existing data center, and that allows you to reclaim lost capacities due to power over [partitioning?].
Next area’s around maximizing virtualization potential. This allows you to squeeze every bit of productivity out of your server’s infrastructure. For example, Insight Control, which is now bundled with any server models, allows you to reduce operational expenses by up to $48,000 for every hundred users. This is based on an IDC study performed earlier this year. Insight Control allows you to unlock your infrastructure’s potential by giving you total control over your server infrastructure, either onsite or remotely. It gives you a single easy to use management console where you can proactively monitor your service health and performance, deploy new service quickly, and manage virtual machines, meaning increased flexibility to quickly respond to the needs of your business. First, HP provides the broadest line of Intel and AMD based platforms, leveraging the latest processors from our partners. The new ProLiant G6 servers take full advantage of these advancements, delivering up to double the performance of existing quad core Intel and AMD servers. Second is new memory technology, such as DDR3, offers twice the bandwidth, double the capacity, and 25% less power use. For example, many HP ProLiant G6 servers jump from 8 [dim?] to 18 [dims?] with the G6 models, and now expand to 144 gigabytes memory. HP also has a new online memory configuration tool that optimizes your configuration for power, performance, or cost.
Third area’s the ProLiant G6 servers include the new generation of HP Smart Array controllers delivering 200% greater performance and 100% backward compatibility. This new modular design is the industry’s first to scale from entry level RAID solutions for small/medium
businesses to high end RAID functionality for larger enterprises, all through the simple addition of hardware and software expansion options. So how does this all add up? HP ProLiant G6 servers offer more memory processing and I/O to give you more mailboxes per server than ever before, or leverage Microsoft Hyper [B?] technology to consolidate your Exchange infrastructure
into a single physical box. The result is a significantly lower cost per mailbox and optimum resource utilization in your data center.
Slide 9:
Exchange 2007 added the ability to use direct attach storage in a CCR Exchange deployment and cluster deployment model, and reductions in disk I/O allowed for greater freedom in disk choice. Exchange 2010 includes additional improvements to performance, reliability, and high
availability that enable an even wider range of storage options. For example, Exchange 2010 delivers a greater than 50% reduction in disk I/O from Exchange 2000 levels. Exchange 2000 achieved between a 50 and 70% reduction over Exchange 2003. So we see this continued reduction in disk requirements. This now allows more disk to meet the minimum performance requirements to run Exchange 2010. I/O patterns have been optimized so disk writes do not come in bursts. The bursty nature of Exchange 2003 and previous versions are what required such large dedicated storage arrays and also allowed organizations to deploy their environment based on not being able to leverage things such as control or cache. This removes a barrier that had previously limited the use of SATA disks, particularly midline SATA disks. Exchange 2010 is more resilient to storage problems. When corruption is caused by minor disk faults, Exchange automatically repairs the effective database pages using one of the database copies configured for high availability. When Exchange 2010 is deployed with advanced availability, three plus replicated database copies, RAID-less architectures can be used, resulting in dramatic cost savings. This flexibility of storage choice gives administrators the freedom to deploy large multi-gigabyte mailboxes across a variety of storage technologies from HP, ranging from JBOD, RAID-less, Midline SATA and SAS disks through Direct attached, RAID protected, Enterprise SAS and SATA drives, [ISCSI?] switch SAS or fiber channel arrays, which provide a data center wide solution for an organization’s storage needs.
Slide 10:
HP has developed a tiered solution matrix for Exchange to provide guidance on building Exchange 2010 solutions to meet different Exchange service levels and business requirements. The tiered solution matrix matches server and storage hardware components and configurations, along with the appropriate Exchange 2010 availability features to meet different service levels and features and associated with different classes of users or different organizational needs. For example, the functionality and service level needs of a C level executive are likely quite different from those of a part-time mall kiosk worker. Mailbox quotas, client types, and access methods, information, security, and compliance needs, and recovery point and recovery time objectives will all vary greatly. This tiered solutions approach is designed to marry the appropriate HP server and storage, along with configuration options within Exchange 2010 to meet these needs. There are four tiers of service defined in the matrix, categorized as bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. These tiers provide guidance in matching different mailbox service levels with the appropriate HP server and storage configurations, as mentioned. These solutions range from basic mailbox services and HP’s entry level server and storage platforms, to highly available configurations built with Enterprise server and storage products.
In these configurations, the bronze tier is designed for deployments where cost is a driving factor. This tier provides basic services without the additional cost of high availability, and is targeted towards smaller cost sensitive deployments. The bronze tier uses an all in one approach
combining each of the primary Exchange roles -- the mailbox server, the hub transport, and the client access server -- onto a single physical box.
The silver tier is targeted towards smaller environments supporting sensitive users with limited IT budgets. For increased availability, the silver tier provides support for database replication using DAGs, but it limits cost by combining the exchange roles using the all in one approach with two servers.
The gold tier is targeted toward a wide range of customer scenarios, from small to large
organizations needing a high level of data protection and availability for their important users. This tier expands the server and storage high availability options, along with dedicated Exchange server roles.
The highest level in the tiered solution matrix is the platinum tier, which is targeted toward Enterprise deployments requiring the highest level of data protection for their most critical users. The platinum tiers builds on the gold tier, offering additional database copies and new storage options, including RAID-less JBOD with Enterprise server and storage hardware with
Exchange’s high availability features. A minimum of three database copies are recommended when using RAID-less JBOD configurations.
Slide 11:
So let’s now look at some very specific configurations targeted at different user segments. The first segment is the small business segment, and the recommended configuration here leverages the HP ProLiant DL180 G6 server, configured with internal storage. The recommended
configurations are detailed using both bronze and silver tiered solutions. The bronze tier configuration includes a standalone server with combined Exchange server roles. Silver tier builds on that by adding a second server, providing increased availability using DAGs. A solution has been sized to support 100 users with 2 gig mailboxes and an Exchange 2010 heavy usage profile. The DL180 G6 server was developed specifically to address the needs of small and medium business. It’s highly versatile, supporting up to 14 large form factor or 25 small form factor internal disks. Both the large form factor and small form factor configurations are viable with this platform. In fact, the 14 large form factor disk configuration would allow this configuration to scale up into the mid market, supporting up to 500 users of this profile using 12 disks and 10 gigabytes of RAM.
Slide 12:
The mid market recommended configuration for 1,000 users leverages the ProLiant ML or DL370 G6 server configured with internal storage, as well. As with the previous configuration, this recommended configuration also details both bronze and silver tiered solutions. The DL370 G6 is offered in both the tower or rack mount configuration. The 370 G6 provides dual
processor compute powerful in a convenient [4U?] chassis, designed for businesses that want Enterprise class features and performance. This configuration is constrained by the number of internal disks. Some expansion would be possible using small form factor disks because the current configuration includes 17 disks in that configuration. External storage could also be leveraged to scale this configuration beyond 1,000 users to [certainly?] expansion capabilities available from a memory perspective and processing capability.
Slide 13:
The Enterprise recommended configurations in this presentation leverage the HP ProLiant BL460 G6 server blades, coupled with the MDS600 for a direct attach storage configuration. In HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise virtual array or EDA4400 SAN would also meet the storage requirements of this user population. This solution’s been sized to support 4,000 users with 2 gigabyte mailboxes and an Exchange 2010 heavy usage profile. The BL460 server blades feature dual Intel Xeon 5500 series processors. They also feature new power regulators that provides operating system independent power management feature for server powers
consumption and system performance to meet the critical business needs. There are a multitude of storage configuration options for Exchange 2010. This reference configuration alone for mailbox servers accounts for three options: SATA using the MDS600 with RAID fault tolerance; SATA using the MDS600 with RAID-less JBOD; and SAS with RAID in the MDS600, as well. The RAID-less configurations use SATA disks in a JBOD configuration and rely on the DAG for database fault level tolerance. Each JBOD is configured with a single database and log. If this disk fails, the database and logs are then failed over to another copy within the DAG. With fault tolerance at the database level, there should be a minimum of three database copies to ensure adequate database redundancy. The SATA JBOD option is one of the platinum tier storage options within HP’s tiered solutions matrix. The MDS600 has been specifically designed to provide direct-attached storage capabilities for HP ProLiant server blades. It provides high density storage capable of supporting up to 70 large form factor SAS or SATA disks in just five [U?] of rack space. With the direct-attached capabilities, disks can be zoned or assigned to individual blade servers, allowing the disk to appear as local storage to the server.
Slide 14:
The recommended configurations are detailed using the gold and platinum tier solutions. The gold tier solutions achieve availability by providing two copies of the database in a single DAG. The platinum tier builds on the gold tier by adding a third database copy in support for the JBOD configurations. There’s enough headroom with the various storage options to increase mailbox capacity and add more users to this configuration. This serves only as a starting point. You can see where the storage design is capacity bound. The JBOD solution depends on having at least three copies of the databases to compensate for the resiliency against disk loss, typically provided by hardware based RAID.
Slide 15:
Now that we’ve looked at some reference configurations, let’s now look at some screenshots from the forthcoming HP Sizer for Exchange 2010 and see how users can input their specific business needs to tailor the recommended infrastructure for their use. The Sizer offers several modes of operation, from a minimal input example configuration mode to a highly customizable expert build mode. We’re going to take a look at some screenshots from the expert mode. Slide 16:
So this is one of the first screens from the Exchange 2010 Sizer. The Sizer is designed as an architectural planning scratch pad. It allows users to create snapshots of their organization, including physical sites that contain mailboxes, and how they plan to protect the data of different classes of users through the database availability group feature of Exchange 2010.
Slide 17:
The Sizer allows for creation of user profiles, which apply to different classes of users within an organization. The examples mentioned earlier when referring to the tiered solutions approach with service levels and the user experience needs of C level executives versus factory floor and mall kiosk workers can all be defined within the Sizer’s profile definition screen, as shown here. The Sizer allows the user to define the messaging workload through a series of Microsoft defined profiles, or for more advanced messaging architects allows complete customization of message traffic rates, expected I/O loads, and average message sizes. Usage details which affect sizing recommendations such as client types, inclusion of popular mobile devices, desktop search engines, et cetera, can all be entered into this profile worksheet. Also, information about users requiring data retention for compliance purposes is captured here, as well.
Slide 18:
Once the profiles have been defined they’re then assigned to each site and the number of mailboxes of each profile are identified. The Sizer user has the option to segment different profiles into their own databases, which would allow for different DAG designs, including numbers of copies, disk types, disk designs, et cetera associated with each profile. The DAG details can then be defined including the number of [passive?] copies of each site of these databases. Server resiliency information is also included in server role placement; everything from being collapsed into a single physical server to dedicated redundant servers for each role can also be defined. The Sizer provides a great deal of flexibility for messaging architects to define their Exchange 2010 environment, as well as provides best practices mode which minimizes user input questions, and maximizes HP’s expertise and experience in Exchange design to arrive at a recommendation which best meets the user’s needs. In the final tool, once the interview process is done, the Sizer would provide a complete bill of materials and some recommendations about the layout of things such as server options and storage based on the user’s input.
Slide 19:
So over the last 20 or 25 minutes or so you’ve gotten a glimpse into why the combination of HP and Microsoft for your unified communication and collaboration solutions provides you with your best opportunity for success. Our solutions are built on over 25 years of deep technical and business alignment between our companies, which today translates to the industry’s broadest portfolio of infrastructure and professional services offerings for Exchange 2010, designed to help you meet your business needs. HP has an extensive roadmap of supporting evidence related to planning, deploying, and managing your Exchange 2010 environment. There are a number of reference architectures, test solutions, best practices white papers, sizing tools, and webinars available at the HP.com website listed in this session. We hope you visit our website and explore the rest of HP’s content as part of this virtual launch event as you consider moving forward with your Exchange 2010 efforts. Thanks for your attention.
